Paul Elie is a Senior Fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the Director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. He is the author of two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012), and of essays and articles for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Commonweal, and other periodicals. In the American Pilgrimage Project he is examining the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives.